YouTube Begins the Second Funding Round of Original Video Creators

More YouTube’s monies! More magnificent lovely YouTube’s monies for content creators! Google’s grandiose video site is ladling additional funds to its content partners, allowing them to keep on producing premium oeuvres on the site. But unlike the previous allowance round, this time YouTube has sieved far less sponsored channels.

Slightly less than a year ago, YouTube started a venture which aimed to finance channels of original video creators. YouTube had allocated a dazzling $100 million to yield videos for over 160 million channels and the content creators were supposed to return the investment via advertisements. Once the partners had returned the investment, they could keep the ad revenue (through the regular split with Google).

So now, after piloting this initiative for about a year, YouTube is preparing for the second round of video funding. In this round however, only 30-40 percent of the original creators will benefit from Google’s capital (around 50 to 60 channels). The rest of the pack won’t be thrown to the wolves of course and would be still able to cultivate their channels themselves, as some of them have yet to retrieve the initial investment.

Obviously the ones who will enjoy this round of funding are unsurprisingly the ones who had generated most of the revenue. That doesn’t necessarily means the channels with the bulk share of video views are the most lucrative (though it’s an essential part), engagement plays a significant role as well- the greater length people watches videos, there’s more opportunities there are to serve them ads.

It also seems that there’s a direct correlation between the amount of revenue a channel manage to produce, to the loyal audience it regularly attracts over time. Courtney Holt, the COO of the media company Maker Studios had shared her insight about that:

Celebrity alone isn’t enough to drive it [the channel], you need to have a commitment to the platform, to understand how to build your audience.

Anyways, the jolly content creators which have advanced into this second round will receive approximately the same allowance as in the first round, around $1 to $5 million for a yearly stream of original videos accompanied with the challenge to build a returning engaged audience. The faster you return YouTube’s investment, the bigger are your chances to receive additional funds on the next round.

Although the mission isn’t simple, video creators can rely on YouTube massive popularity. According to comScore, in September YouTube had a total of over 150 million viewers from the U.S. alone, watching more than 13.1 million videos and spending about 7 hours inside YouTube’s network.